There is no comfort without discomfort. Just like there is no north without south, no man without woman, when you remove discomfort you are left with something soft, stale, and maybe even repulsive. Modern life continues to move toward convenience and taking out the discomfort, and maybe that is why roughly 80 percent of men over 50 are overweight or obese and almost none of them felt it happening.

It came one easy choice at a time: skip the workout, have another drink, the office donuts, gain a few pounds every year, stop learning, stay in the job you don't hate but don't love either, spend your time with people who reinforce the person you've already been (or don't expect more of you). None of those decisions feels catastrophic in the moment, and that is what makes them dangerous. You can age by default without ever making one dramatic decision to do it.

Easy now, hard later. The later part is a statin followed by a blood pressure pill, an A1C over 5.7 that puts the word prediabetic on your chart, and 240 pounds on a frame built for 185. Or the really hard part: cognitive decline and dependency, much like our parents' generation is going through now.

Hard now, easy later is the same list run the other way: no statin, no blood pressure pill, an A1C under 5.7, and a frame carrying the weight it was built for.

Jerzy Gregorek, a four-time World Weightlifting Champion and the author of The Happy Body, wrote the other direction this way: hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life. He also wrote that hard choices mean never retiring. Fewer men take that direction, because the hard part shows up this week and the easy part shows up years out.

Mark Manson posted four steps on September 10. They describe how you choose the hard thing now and keep choosing it. Below, each step gets what it looks like for you this week, and one man's story runs through all four: Robert Hamilton Owens, an average athlete by his own account, from 50 to 71.

Mark Manson is the author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck* and several other books on personal responsibility, meaning, relationships, and how to live a better life without pretending life is supposed to be easy. On September 10 he posted this:

Step 1: Commit to doing a hard thing.

Step 2: Do the hard thing.

Step 3: Feel good about doing the hard thing.

Step 4: Become someone who enjoys doing hard things.

That last step matters. We tend to think discipline means forcing ourselves to do something we hate forever. Repeated action changes identity.

Nine days earlier he posted the other half of the same idea: success is doing the boring things everyone already knows about but too few consistently do. Get good at being boring.

Men tell me the work is boring. The work is not there to entertain you. Boring is beside the point. Find the why in what you do and boring goes away. If you are bored, fix your why. Robert Hamilton Owens finished a 50-hour crucible at 65 and told Mark Divine, on Divine's podcast, what carried him through it: "That 'why' held me."

The economist Thomas Sowell put it this way: "There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs." So what are you trading off? Everything you choose has a price. Fitness has a price. Being unhealthy has a price too. So does staying stuck. Discomfort is coming either way. You get to choose which one is worth it.

Manson's list is four lines. The four sections below take each line in order: what it looks like for you this week, then the men who have lived it. Mark Divine holds the first, David Goggins the second, and Robert Hamilton Owens runs through all four, from a museum joke at 50 to a rowboat in the Atlantic at 71. The commitment comes before the work, the work comes before the win, and the win is what makes the fourth step possible.

A commitment has three parts: what the hard thing is, the date you will do it, and one man you tell.

Writing it down raises the odds. Dr. Gail Matthews at Dominican University found that people who wrote a goal down were 42 percent more likely to reach it. Research from the American Society for Training and Development put the odds of finishing a goal at 65 percent when you commit to another person, and 95 percent when you have a standing appointment to report on it. Those three actions together are what we call the 95% Success Formula. The research is public; the name is ours.

How big should the hard thing be? Dr. Marcus Elliott is a sports scientist who trains professional athletes. Once a year he takes on one challenge he calls a misogi, a word borrowed from a Japanese purification ritual, and Michael Easter wrote about it in The Comfort Crisis. Elliott has two rules. The first is that it has to be really hard. The second is that you can't die.

Really hard has a definition. If you do everything right, you have about a 50 percent chance of finishing. Elliott gives an example. If you have never run more than ten miles, think you could run fifteen, and are unsure about twenty, then a 25-mile trail run qualifies. If you have never run more than a couple of miles, a 10K qualifies. Easter's mother took hers on at 72. A number of Argent Alpha members have done a misogi and shared it with the community. Each was a year-defining act, unique to the man who chose it.

Mark Divine is a retired Navy SEAL commander. He founded SEALFIT and Unbeatable Mind, and he runs Kokoro, a 50-hour crucible for civilians modeled on the SEALs' Hell Week. He tells people to stay away from Kokoro until they are ready to fully commit, because wavering fails you before you show up. His words for it: the first victory is the commitment.

Robert Hamilton Owens is a former Air Force Pararescueman. Divine hired him to train SEAL candidates at SEALFIT, the only trainer there who was never a SEAL, and before he worked there he was a client. Owens was 63, with eleven Ironman finishes behind him, when he decided to find out whether the physical decline he was seeing could be reversed. He took the plan to Divine, and Divine told him to shoot for Kokoro. What happened next is in step four. If you are wondering whether it is too late for you, that is the answer.

One thing comes before the fundamentals. Argent Alpha is built on what we call the Alpha Triad: your Future Self, the man you are becoming; the Alpha 5, five standards you score every day; and R.A.D., recurring accountability. A man who does not yet live that way daily has no business in a misogi. The misogi is the major act of a year, and the fundamentals decide whether you are ready for it. Be the man who lives this way every day first.

This week, the hard thing is the fundamentals, done on the days you don't feel like it. Strength train, eat enough protein, sleep, walk, condition your heart, drink water, recover, and repeat. Lift when you don't feel like lifting. Eat according to a standard instead of an impulse. Have the conversation you've been avoiding. Become a beginner again.

Your body adapts to the load you give it. Muscle grows when you lift heavy enough to ask it to grow, and it shrinks when you stop asking. Whatever capacity you stop asking for, the body lets go of, and your heart and lungs work the same way.

Before you push, know your numbers. Find a gym with an InBody machine and get scanned. The sheet prints your body fat percentage and your skeletal muscle mass in pounds. Ask for the blood panel your doctor already runs and read your A1C, which is the three-month average of your blood sugar. Set a timer on your phone, put your back against a wall with your thighs parallel to the floor, and hold it until you can't. We covered that wall sit in issue #206: our standard is six minutes, and you build toward it with progressive overload. Pushing past a limit you have never measured is how you get hurt. Argent Alpha runs on data before effort.

David Goggins is a retired Navy SEAL and ultramarathoner, and Can't Hurt Me has sold over seven million copies. Two of his ideas apply once you have your numbers. The first is the mirror: stand in front of it and tell yourself the truth about where you are before you start, which is what those numbers do for you. The second he calls callousing the mind. A callus forms on a hand from repeated friction; tolerance for hard work forms the same way. His starting instruction is small: go five to ten percent past the point where you usually stop, and build from there.

The first attempt at anything hard is ugly. We all start ugly and keep working on it. Any man can start, and I wrote about the fear that keeps men from starting in The Fear Nobody Names. Most men start and quit.

Feeling good about the ugly attempt is the third step. The win on day one is that you did the thing, ugly, on the day you didn't feel like it. That counts.

Owens calls himself an average athlete, in those exact words: "I was always an average athlete." At his 50th birthday his oldest son told him he was half a century old and belonged in a museum. Owens had not done an Ironman in twenty years. He did one at 50, another at 51, and another at 52. He describes himself as a guy who does one Ironman a year. On a podcast about his seven-marathon challenge, he talked about building a win into each day.

You begin as the guy trying to get back in shape. Eventually you become the guy who trains. You begin as the guy trying to eat better, and eventually you become the guy who has standards around food. Repeated action changes who you believe you are.

Owens spent the three years after 63 training at SEALFIT in Encinitas, California. At 65 he completed five endurance events in a single year that he had been told he was too old to attempt, and four days before his 66th birthday he finished Kokoro, the 50-hour crucible, 25 years older than the next-oldest man in the group. SEALFIT gave him its award for the oldest man ever to finish it. He ran seven marathons in seven days on seven continents. At 71 he rowed 3,500 miles across the Atlantic in a 24-foot boat with a crew of twelve, three hours on the oars and three hours off. Canary Islands to Antigua, 44 days. His summary, on Divine's podcast: "I'm stronger than I've been since my twenties."

Divine's training rests on one claim, that people are capable of twenty times more than they believe. He calls it the 20X factor.

Robert is a personal friend and an honorary member of Argent Alpha. He speaks, and he coaches. If your company or your team needs a man in front of it who has done every hard thing he would ask of you, or you want him in your corner one on one, start at his site.

Twelve months from now you are standing at the end of the thing you wrote down, the one you had a 50 percent chance of failing, and the first thing you do is send a text to the man you told. Or seven days from now you send that man seven numbers, and you know what every one of them cost you.

In another post, Manson wrote that the person you marry is the person you fight with, and the house you buy is the house you repair. Everything comes with a sacrifice. There is no comfort without discomfort, and discomfort is coming either way.

Pick one track this week.

Apply the exposure, allow the recovery, and repeat.

Argent Alpha runs the four steps on a proven process we call the Alpha Triad: three disciplines, one brotherhood.

Commit. Future Self is the man you are becoming. Every member writes down that man at 90 days and at 12 months, his purpose, his identity, and his legacy, and shares it with the other men.

Do. The Alpha 5 are five standards every member sets for himself: mindset, sleep, nutrition, fitness, and hydration. He scores each one a 1 or a 0 every day. Wicked Wednesday Workouts are the weekly training session, and each week's session builds on the last.

Feel good about it. R.A.D. stands for Recurring Accountability Drivers: track daily, report weekly, test monthly. The weekly report happens on the Monday call, where the ugly week gets reported to men who know what it cost. That is the community in the middle of the triangle, and iron sharpens iron.

Become. Every month a member takes the A³ Fitness Standards, our monthly physical test, and gets an InBody scan that prints his body fat percentage, his skeletal muscle mass, and his visceral fat level, the fat packed around his organs. The identity change shows up as a number he did not have twelve months ago.

Twice a year we put the hard thing on the calendar with a LIVE event. The next one, LIVE VII, runs at Camp Foley, a 300-acre camp in Minnesota, October 2 to 4. On the morning of Saturday, October 3, the men take on a four-hour physical challenge in squads, on trails, carrying a recommended 20 pounds. The afternoon is learning and competing: archery, ax throwing, wall climbing. It is a physical, hands-on day of challenges. Sunday, October 4, is rest, recovery, and reflection, the counter to Saturday. That is the law from the top of this issue, put on a calendar.

Harder to Kill is the community where you start. The full program runs inside Argent Alpha.

Step one is a commitment with a date on it. The next live Harder to Kill workshop is Wednesday, September 23, at 10:30 AM Pacific: Design > Default — Tired of Losing the Same 20 Pounds? How Men Over 50 Make It Stick for Good. The replay goes in the library. The live call gets you the Q&A and an offer that goes only to the men on it.

Harder to Kill is the membership for men over 50 who want the fat gone, the meds gone, and their strength back. It is $47, one time, for life. That $47 buys a live workshop every month, recorded and kept in the library. It buys interviews with Argent Alpha men who did the work, including one who went from 35.4 percent body fat to knocking on the door of 15. It buys the tools those men used: the Roadmap to 15% Body Fat model and the InBody guide written for men over 50. Finish the Kickstart course, the starter course inside, and it buys you a free digital copy of Harder to Kill, my bestselling book. The price holds until we reach 500 members.

Argent Alpha has helped over 300 men become harder to kill (that we know of), and thousands of others based on my Amazon bestselling book and over 200 newsletters.

👉 Join Harder to Kill before the 23rd and you are on the live call.